Tag: iraq

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A Stillness in Iraq

It’s been quiet lately in Iraq, what with last week’s baseball All-Star Game, the Karl Rove Affair, the coming-party for our next Supreme Court guy, and the new Suzanne Somers show on Broadway.

Every once in a while you hear something, though. Maybe it’s a suicide bomber blowing up a gasoline tanker, immolating himself and scores of others. Or the raucous debate surrounding the birth of Iraq’s new democracy, complete with reduced constitutional rights for non-men. Or the insistent thump of improvised explosive devices and car bombs and other detonations (the “coalition” toll this month: 28 dead). Or the nearly inaudible sound of our future mortgaged to war (price tag for our crusade on evil-doers so far: $313 billion, and get ready for much, much more). Or the utter silence of the 24,865 Iraqi civilians who have died in the war.

Quiet week.

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July 1, 2005

Iraq, 835th Day:

“… It is indeed better to fight here. If Iraq has become a training ground for terrorism, so be it. It is then fortunate that the best military in the world just happens to be here ready to locate, close with, and destroy them before they spread. Here in Iraq we are a target for terrorism. Good! They know where to find us, and we invite them to do so. We are wining this fight. One shot at a time. One block at a time, one pair of shoes on a child’s feet at a time, one vote at a time, one free election at a time. To a soldier this is simply duty, nothing more. To the Iraqis, this is a gift, paid with the blood of youth, paid for in missed anniversaries, paid for in bitter combat, paid for in the hopes and dreams of Americans being forever extinguished on streets called, Haifa, and 60th, in towns called Dora, and Karadda. In a country called Iraq, in a place once called the cradle of civilization. We are the light by which the new democracy of Iraq will traverse through the darkness. We are Americans!”

From a U.S. soldier’s blog: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum

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Bush’s Numbers

The New York Times is out with its latest poll on how we, red states and blue alike, feel about our commander-in-chief/village idiot. Here’s the lead:

“Increasingly pessimistic about Iraq and skeptical about President Bush’s plan for Social Security, Americans are in a season of political discontent, giving Mr. Bush one of the lowest approval ratings of his presidency and even lower marks to Congress, according to the New York Times/CBS News Poll.”

“Season of political discontent.” That’s got a ring to it. But does it actually mean anything? On its Web site, the Times publishes 21 pages of poll results. The statistics apparently include all the questions asked in its most recent survey as well the past results when the same questions were asked. It’s interesting to look at what people were saying a year ago.

Then, the Times poll found that 42 percent of respondents approved of the way Bush was handling his job, and 51 percent did not. Today’s dramatic change: 42 percent approve and 51 percent do not.

Let’s look at Iraq. The Times asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?” A year ago, 36 percent said they approved and 58 percent said they disapproved; today, 37 percent approve and 59 percent disapprove.

(The poll’s historical numbers on Iraq seem to show how much we like a winner, how much we’re swayed by a good TV picture, and how ephemeral wide popular support of the war has been: The high point for Iraq support in this poll came in a survey done April 11-13, 2003, immediately after U.S. troops entered Baghdad and we all got to watch that Saddam statue getting pulled down: 79 percent said they approved of Bush’s handling of Iraq and 17 percent disapproved. The support numbers stayed in the 70s through late May ’03 — the month Bush declared victory — but fell into the high 50s in July. September 2003 marked the first time the poll found more respondents (47 percent) disapproving than approving (46 percent). And in fact, the approval number has risen above 50 percent just once since — the week after Saddam’s capture in December 2003, when it popped up to 59 percent, only to fall back into the 40s by mid-January.)

The point is, if we’re in a season of political discontent, it’s nothing new. The real question you need to unravel is how, with numbers like this, did Bush get re-elected. I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that, but some of the elements of an answer are out there: The public’s low regard for Congress (current approval number, according to Times poll, is 33 percent; and the rather confounding finding that people approve of Bush’s handling of the war on terrorism (52-40 in the current poll).

And beyond the numbers, there’s the fact the Democrats can’t seem to find the utterly perfect candidate that everyone seems to think they need as an alternative to Bush and his crew of nation wreckers. I wonder if people, in their discontent, would consider Kerry now?

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Iraq: The Next Generation

One: A long Chicago Tribune piece (the version I saw was reprinted in the Tallahassee Democrat; Democrat?) on a debate going back to the late 1980s about re-configuring the U.S. armed forces to fight the kind of war we’re in the middle of now. The story focuses on proponents of a philosophy called “fourth-generation warfare” who have been highly critical of the Pentagon’s persistence, even now, in developing and maintaining a war machine designed to fight a big tank war against a great power like the Soviet Union:

Nearly 16 years ago, a group of four military officers and a civilian predicted the rise of terrorism and anti-American insurgencies with chilling accuracy.

The group said U.S. military technology was so advanced that foreign forces would be unlikely to challenge it directly, and it forecast that future foes would be non-state insurgents and terrorists whose weapons would be suicide car bombs, not precision-guided weapons.

“Today, the United States is spending $500 million apiece for stealth bombers,” the group wrote in a 1989 article that appeared in a professional military journal. “A terrorist stealth bomber is a car with a bomb in the trunk – a car that looks like every other car.”

The critics conclude that despite some well-meaning attempts at adopting new tactics in Iraq — trying to train troops in the rudiments of the local language and culture (which doesn’t seem like such a new thing, really) — the war has gone so far down the wrong road that it’s doomed. One of the critics, who sounds like an ultra-conservative war-hawk type, says simply: “There’s nothing that you can do in Iraq today that will work. That situation is irretrievably lost.”

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Whitman’s War, Our War

As I was saying — May 31 is Walt Whitman’s birthday. I’ve always been struck by his Civil War poems, their brevity and power, the immediacy of them, the empathy in them, the unflinching way he conveyed the suffering he saw and the suffering he took in. For instance, this scene from “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown“:

“We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building;

’Tis a large old church at the crossing roads—’tis now an impromptu hospital;

—Entering but for a minute, I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made:

Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,

And by one great pitchy torch, stationary, with wild red flame, and clouds of smoke;

By these, crowds, groups of forms, vaguely I see, on the floor, some in the pews laid down;

At my feet more distinctly, a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen;)

I staunch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily;)

Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene, fain to absorb it all;

Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead;

Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood;

The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms of soldiers—the yard outside also fill’d;

Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the death-spasm sweating;

An occasional scream or cry, the doctor’s shouted orders or calls;

The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches. …”

Whitman was writing for an audience for whom this kind of loss was familiar. When the Civil War ended, every American knew someone who had been killed or wounded (rough arithmetic: 4 percent of the male population counted in the 1860 census died as a result of the war; that’s one in 25 men in the entire country; that ratio in today’s U.S. population would equal 6 million deaths). When Whitman wrote about the horror and tragedy of a field hospital, he was describing a scene that involved his readers in a very personal way.

The Whitman war poem — especially his picture of the field hospital — came to mind in part because, in the midst of my Memorial Day reading, I just happened across a piece from an American military doctor working in a combat hospital in Iraq. It’s immediate and moving in its own way:

“They wheeled the soldier into the ER on a NATO gurney shortly after the chopper touched down. One look at the PJs’ [pararescuemen’s] faces told me that the situation was grim. Their young faces were drawn and tight, and they moved with a sense of directed urgency. They did not even need to speak because the look in their eyes was pleading with us – hurry. And hurry we did.”

The piece isn’t Whitman. For one thing, a lot of the it’s given over to marked pro-war rhetoric and a sort of “Top Gun” meets “ER” attitude that seems a little foreign to the humanity of the situation. And the author is writing about a scene that most of us aren’t personally connected to and probably don’t want to think too much about. That in itself makes it worth the time to read and ponder.

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Memorial Day …

… Is almost over. I whiled away part of the patriotic three-day weekend watching some of the Turner Classic Movies “all war flicks, all the time” marathon. Saw almost all of “A Bridge Too Far,” which is extraordinary for its overuse of big-name actors and big-time pyrotechnics in the service of perhaps the last romantic World War II feature. Saw parts of “M*A*S*H,” which has aged amazingly well. Saw parts of “Patton,” which seems ludicrous to me now. Beyond my personal political leanings, I think the war-themed movies just look different in the post-“Saving Private Ryan”/”Band of Brothers” era, when there’s been an effort to bring something like combat verity into the movies and television.

For a film about such a famously hard-nosed character, “Patton” comes off as little more than a romantic caricature in which one great man spends a couple hours strutting around in front of a bunch of cardboard cutouts. That’s the way it looks now. Then — it came out the same year as “M*A*S*H,” 1970 — it was enormously popular and a big winner at the 1971 Oscars. It’s hard to say why looking at it now, though of course the period is suggestive: Vietnam was unpopular but not yet recorded in the “not-won” column, and the movie features a hero who built a reputation for driving tanks through any opposition, damn subtlety or consequences. “M*A*S*H” spoke a lot more directly to the anti-war audience then, and because of its grim humor, frankness about the business at a combat hospital, and Robert Altman’s handling of a great ensemble of actors, it still seems fresh.

That leaves “A Bridge Too Far,” which is almost embarrassing to watch. The stock upbeat theme music. The star-studded cast. The stiff upper lip in the face of insuperable odds. The impassive, smugly superior Nazis (this time with a reason to be smug and superior). The nobility of defeat and massive casualties. It’s good that Hollywood has almost quit making this movie, or this kind of movie (from the trailers, Mel Gibson’s “We Were Soldiers Once,” looks like an attempt to give Vietnam the same heroic treatment).

But it makes you wonder, a little, how Iraq will be turned into a big-screen treat. (The best clue: Go rent “Three Kings.” More pleasingly flashy entertainment, less reality — but we’re OK with that.)

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Fugue State

It’s getting into the warm season again in Iraq. And, if military commanders The New York Times cites are to be believed, it’s far from the last summer our troops will spend chasing insurgents, building Mesopotamian democracy, and cleaning up after our Great Architect of World Liberty:

“In interviews and briefings this week, some of the generals pulled back from recent suggestions, some by the same officers, that positive trends in Iraq could allow a major drawdown in the 138,000 American troops late this year or early in 2006. One officer suggested Wednesday that American military involvement could last ‘many years.’ ”

“Many years.” Profoundly sad. Profoundly depressing. But not really surprising.

I remember Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, how glorious that was, what a thorough vindication of its boldness and military superiority. I don’t recall anyone talking in the immediate aftermath about “Palestinians” or “occupied territories. That came later, and it came to stay. Thirty-eight years after its triumph, Israel is walling itself off from its conquest.

Thirty-eight years. I wonder how long it will take us to get home from Iraq, or whether we ever really will?

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Retractions

By all means, let’s pillory Newsweek for muffing its “Koran in the toilet” revelation, a bit of one-source journalism that’s somehow led millions of people to think most Americans are less than reverent toward Islam. It’s good to know that those who lead us still have some capacity for outrage when the truth of a complex situation is served less than perfectly and lives are needlessly lost. And perhaps Rumsfeld, Rice, their many minions — and, who knows, maybe even the president — can take a lesson from Newsweek and come clean about the untruths they’ve promoted that led to bloodshed. You know what I’m talking about: Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s role as international terrorist overlord, and the imminent threat they posed to the United States. There are other matters to say “We’re sorry” for, too — the criminally poor planning for our attack’s aftermath, for instance — but it would be nice to start with a heartfelt retraction and apology to the 20-some thousand who have died because of everything those first untruths set in motion.

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What Are They Fighting For?

One of the most unsatisfying aspects of the ongoing coverage of the Iraq war: The failure of the media to make more than a token stab at explaining and exploring the insurgency. Generally, you get one of two types of approach in most stories: a simple gloss over — we can’t tell you who these people are or why they’re doing what they’re doing, but we can tell you they set off six more car bombs today; or a gloss over that follows the “coalition” line on explaining the insurgents — they’re thugs, murderers, enemies of democracy.

They may be all of these things. But it’s hardly acceptable to leave it at that. Our leaders have given us the gift of Iraq, and it’s one of those gifts that keeps on giving. Unless we think we can kill everyone who’s disinclined to go along with us over there, we better start figuring out the more complex reality driving the violence.

The New York Times had a story Saturday — “The Mystery of the Insurgency” — that’s the first attempt I’ve seen in the mainstream press to directly raise the question of what lies behind the insurgents’ tactics:

The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in winning hearts and minds among the majority of Iraqis, in building international legitimacy, or in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans. They have put forward no single charismatic leader, developed no alternative government or political wing, displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern now.

Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government. Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks, and on Thursday a bomb went off in heavy traffic in Baghdad, killing 21 people.

This surge in the killing of civilians reflects how mysterious the long-term strategy remains – and how the rebels’ seeming indifference to the past patterns of insurgency is not necessarily good news for anyone.

There are no answers in the story, really. But beginning to explore the questions the insurgency raises is a start.

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Iraq Reader

Demise of a Hard-Fighting Squad

Washington Post, May 12

“Among the four Marines killed and 10 wounded when an explosive device erupted under their Amtrac on Wednesday were the last battle-ready members of a squad that four days earlier had battled foreign fighters holed up in a house in the town of Ubaydi. In that fight, two squad members were killed and five were wounded.

“In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be.

“Every member of the squad — one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment — had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon — which Hurley commands — had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.

” ‘They used to call it Lucky Lima,’ said Maj. Steve Lawson, commander of the company. ‘That turned around and bit us.’ ”

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Authorities find missing ex-soldier blinded by Iraq blast

(Associated Press, May 11)

“DUNBAR, Pa. — A former soldier blinded by shrapnel while serving in Iraq was found alive Tuesday night, a day after he disappeared after telling an ex-girlfriend he was depressed, police and his family said. …

“Salvatore “Sam” Ross Jr., 23, of Dunbar Township, will be admitted to a veterans’ hospital psychiatric unit for observation, his aunt, Tina Pifer, told The Associated Press. …

” ‘I just don’t understand what low he’s at right now because everything seemed to be coming together with building his house,’ Pifer said. ‘But, you know what? This kid is suffering so bad from depression. People just don’t understand the things this kid has been through over the last two years.’ ”

[I thought there was something familiar to me about Ross when I first read about his disappearance the other day. He’s one of the injured soldiers featured in Nina Berman’s “Purple Hearts — Back from Iraq.”]

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Iraqi police vent anger at US after car bombings

(Australian Broadcasting Corp., May 10)

“Iraqi police hurled insults at US soldiers after two suicide car bomb blasts in Baghdad killed at least seven people and left 19 wounded, including policemen.

” ‘It’s all because you’re here,’ a policeman shouted in Arabic at a group of US soldiers after the latest in a bloody wave of attacks that have rocked Baghdad this month.

” ‘Get out of our country and there will be no more explosions,’ he told the uncomprehending Americans staring at the smouldering wreck of a car bomb.”

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Army to Spend Day Retraining Recruiters

New York Times, May 12

“Responding to reports about widespread abuses of the rules for recruitment, Army officials said yesterday that they would suspend all recruiting on May 20 and use the day to retrain its personnel in military ethics and the laws that govern what can and cannot be done to enlist an applicant.

” … At least one family in Ohio reported that its mentally ill son was signed up, despite rules banning such enlistments and records about his illness that were readily available.

“David McSwane, a 17-year-old who lives outside Denver, also recently caught one recruiter on tape, advising him on how to create a fake diploma, and another helping him buy a product that purportedly cleansed his system of illegal-drug residue. This week, a CBS affiliate in Houston, KHOU-TV, played a voice mail message from a local recruiter that threatened a young man with arrest if he did not appear at a nearby recruiting station.

“Army statistics show that substantiated cases of improprieties have increased by more than 60 percent, to 320 in 2004 from 199 in 1999. Recruiters and former Army officials say they are related to the extraordinary pressure being put on recruiters, who must meet quotas of roughly two recruits a month. The strain is breeding not just abuses, they said, but also stress-related illnesses, damaged marriages and even thoughts of suicide among some.”